The Lord G-d is Truth.” (Jer 10:10). “The seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is Truth.” (Shabbat 55a) “Thy Torah is Truth.” (Ps 119:142) “…Whose Torah is Truth, Whose prophets are Truth, Who abounds in deeds of Goodness and Truth.” (Siddur, citing the Zohar) These classic Jewish statements, from the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar, and the Siddur, make one thing perfectly clear:
An assault on truth is an assault on G-d. It is a form of blasphemy.
It is also an assault on humanity itself. As political theorist Mikhail Bakhtin said, “He who is deceived is turned into a thing.” Human beings, created in the image of G-d, deserve the truth. Only those who see people as less than human attempt to induce them to enter a world of falsehood and lies. We saw that clearly, and horrifically, enough in the Holocaust, but it is equally true in far less dramatic circumstances. “The Holy One, blessed be He, hates a person who says one thing with his mouth and another in his heart.” (Pesachim 113b).
An assault on truth is also an assault on the body politic. No truth, no trust. And democracy, unlike dictatorship, relies on trust. Of course, we all know the old joke, “How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” In point of fact, there is nothing funny about that joke. There never was. It’s merely sad. But nowadays, the situation is worse. Far worse. Because the basis of the joke is that there is this thing called truth, from which politicians sometimes, even often, choose to deviate.
Nowadays, though, we are facing something different, something unprecedented. We are facing an assault on the very concept of truth, a denial that there is such a thing as truth.
In Wonderland, the Queen declares, “Here in Wonderland, words mean exactly what I want them to mean.” And here in our land, the lawyer of the President of the United States declares “The truth isn’t truth.” When it was pointed out to him in astonishment that, “facts are not in the eye of the beholder,” he answered, just as the Queen of Wonderland would have: “Yes, they are. Nowadays they are.”
“Nowadays they are.”
In my entire life, I don’t believe I have ever heard words more chilling, more dangerous, and more in need of condemnation, than those.
“Nowadays they are.”
The manifestations of this, what shall I call it, plague, are all around us. In totalitarian regimes, it’s common to outlaw discussion of unwelcome truths. In Russia, it is a crime to discuss the Katyn massacre, the murder of tens of thousands of Polish intellectuals by the Russians, who blamed it on the Nazis. In China, it is impossible to google the Tiananmen Square massacre. What you get instead is a pretty tourist picture. In Poland, it is now a crime to talk about Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In Turkey, it is a crime—“insulting Turkishness,” if you can believe it—to talk about the Armenian genocide. And countless tinhorn dictatorships have a law about insulting the dignity of the president—whose dignity, or lack thereof, is almost certainly deserving of insult, just by virtue of having a law like that.
But again, from the outside, we can see what these efforts are—a deliberate, and unintentionally comical, attempt to obfuscate a clearly true reality. What we are dealing with nowadays is worse.
We have gotten used to the willful denial of reality, from right, left, and center. The birther fantasy about President Obama. The conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job. The denial of global warming. “I’m not a scientist,” proclaim the politicians, usually with a southern accent. To which the only sane response is, “Then why don’t you shut up and listen to one?” Just for the record, one of our members, Jerry Silver, literally wrote the book on global warming. Don’t believe me. Ask him.
What are the consequences of a social climate lacking facticity? Constant manufactured turmoil, and attendant turbulent emotions. An inability to plan for the future, and instead energy diverted into the latest empty controversy. Life reduced “to spectacle and feeling.” (Timothy Snyder) While we run around tut-tutting about the latest craziness, the newest court case, the most recent porn star, we witness the beginnings of the long-term consequences of the crises we seem unable to address. Consider, for example, the celebrated “Chinese hoax” of global warming—as California burns, the Atlantic coast floods, and the Midwest bakes. By the way, this is not the new normal. Scientists tell us we haven’t reached the new normal yet. It’s predicted to be worse than it is nowadays. It’s like the line from the Simpsons: “Today is not the worst day of your life. It’s only the worst day of your life so far.”
We live in a world of “fake news,” but this is not an American invention. It was used in Russia before it came here. “It meant creating a fictional text that posed as a piece of journalism, both to spread confusion about a particular event and” more important in the long run, “to discredit journalism as such.” Those who wish to destroy the concept of truth first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally assert that only their spectacles are real. (Timothy Snyder)
“The point [of the exercise]: to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality,” and to consolidate power. (Timothy Snyder) Once there is nothing left but doubt, there is no way to organize, no way to plan, no way to envision a better collective future. There is no alternative but to fall back on a kind of mindless nativism, filled with fanciful nostalgia for the good old days and fantasies about some enemy, foreign or domestic, some Other with a capital O, who is keeping us from the imagined glorious future which is our imaginary glorious past. The way we never were.
We have heard this before. In Orwell’s 1984, he presciently imagined a totalitarian state where “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,“ and “ignorance is strength.” He called this “doublespeak,” Nowadays we call it “alternative facts,” and it’s just as dangerous nowadays as Orwell predicted it would be—because it destroys our ability to be true citizens.
“The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty,” wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt, “is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.”
“Well enough informed?” Of what? The latest tape, the latest scandal, the latest lie? Under other circumstances, one might look to the media to cut through the fog and get at the truth. But at this point, it is often the case that the media serves to deny factuality, rather than champion it.
It should be obvious at this point that we are being played. We are being played by those who manufacture crises in order to suppress the knowledge that might inspire action, to shift discussion from facts to emotions; played by those manipulate those emotions so as to paralyze us from any reasonable action. The slanderous and scandalous message we receive is that “no one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them.” (Timothy Snyder)
Let us repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them.
We see this, certainly, with Holocaust denial. The preposterous nature of such a claim—that the murder of 6 million Jews was a manipulative hoax, a conspiracy maintained by tens of millions of people, greedy Jews first and foremost—was no barrier to the formation of an unholy Holocaust-denying alliance between far right neo-nazis and far left anti-zionists. The facts didn’t matter. What mattered was instilling hatred for the people and country of Israel. That’s what the anti-Semites, left and right, like to hear, so it must be true.
Holocaust denial is the domain of looney tunes. But nowadays that same dynamic—merely repeating things we like to hear—infects our American politics, our relationship to Israel, and even our self-perceptions—the topics I will be addressing over the course of these High Holy Days.
How in the world did we get to this place? Death by a thousand cuts. First there were those academics claiming that objectivity was impossible. Then you had the rise of “narratives” in the place of facts. Truth doesn’t matter, it all depends on how you look at it, or, more accurately, how you feel about it. Deconstruction chimed in with the idea that whatever you think you know is based on the imposed perceptions of the powerful, and the attendant idea that the truth necessarily lay elsewhere.
Instead of a factually based and universally shared perception of reality, what develops is, in a word, a cult of the lie, a tribe formed around assertions that are passionately shared, creating a collective bond among those “enlightened ones” who “know the real story.” The fact that these assertions may be bizarre and ludicrous is irrelevant. The believers form a closed circle. This so-called expert cites that so-called expert—as long as they are on the same ideological team—and that one cites a third one and the third one cites the first one and the circle is complete. That the circle is like a cat chasing its own tail seems to matter far less than the frenzied emotions the chase generates. As Yeats wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
The idea “that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts.” But nowadays, there are those who exploit this naïve convention and simultaneously do what they can to destroy its very basis.” (Timothy Snyder) The point is that what actually happened, we are told, is less important than what the powerful say happened. And the public is given the choice of accepting the obvious facts, as boring or disappointing as these may be, or else participating in the collective drama that reinforces their own righteousness and the evil of the Other. Simply put, those in power nowadays are producers of outrage rather than formulators of policy. (Timothy Snyder)
“Ignorance begets ignorance,” a sense of naïve innocence, and powerlessness before the bewildering forces that we cannot even grasp clearly, much less control.
But Rosh Hashanah tells us that we are, indeed, responsible, and must not allow ourselves to wallow in ignorance. And we can only act responsibly if we have an overwhelming commitment to the truth and to the deeds that reflect our awareness of it. Let us think for a moment about the whole process of teshuvah, about repentance. “The temptation to believe what feels right assails us at all times from all directions.” (Timothy Snyder) On the societal level, authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. But this is equally true on the individual level, where our yetzer hara, our evil inclination, works overtime to convince us, precisely, that what we desire is what is right. And down that path lies great evil.
But all is not lost. The great teacher of Jewish ethics, mussar, Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, once wrote, “Even after the desires of one’s heart have persuaded him to accept the false way as true, he still knows in his heart of hearts that the true path is ‘truer’ than the other one. Every human being thus has the faculty of determining in his own heart where the real truth lies.” Our task, our sacred task on these High Holy Days, is to undergo such powerful introspection, such soul-searching honesty, that the light of the divine will illumine for us the path of truth, the path to truth.
Keeping it simple, as spiritual teacher Jack Kornfield once said, “We don’t have to take the story as truth.” In fact, we must not take the story as truth.
Especially, “Nowadays.”
May G-d give us the strength and wisdom to seek the truth, to find it, and most important, to defend it. Amen.
Please note: Much of this sermon is based on insights gained from reading Timothy Snyder’s book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Read it and weep.